Maggie
She hears her stomach growl. She should have gone to the refectory, a small building next to the crew lodge, where they put out meals and snacks for employees.
She hears nothing outside. The Wooden Duck isn’t open yet, and the lobby downstairs is quiet. She hears Chip say, What on earth are you up to?
She loves when she hears him. At ease, Tiger, when she was stressed. Or, What in tarnation? when he couldn’t believe something.
She can still see him as his old self, too, but just briefly—baking bread and biscuits after their mother got him a cookbook for his birthday, or putting bubbles from the dish soap on his face and saying he was a snow monster.
She hears a noise now and turns toward the door, and Taffy enters by herself.
“You,” Maggie says, and Taffy has her mouth open in a dog smile and comes over and nudges her. What on earth are you up to?
Taffy walks over to her water bowl and then drinks and drinks, the sound echoing. Then she jumps on the big couch and seems to instantly fall asleep.
Maggie taps her fingers on the desk and wishes she had some coffee.
She sees photographs behind Mrs. Simmons’s desk—one of a handsome man with a mustache in a kayak, and another with the same man, a little girl in each arm.
The girls must be twins because their outfits are the same, and both wear pigtails with yarn ribbons.
She wonders how long ago the photo was taken.
There is another one with the two girls riding a pony together, a younger Mrs. Simmons pulling the lead rope and waving at the camera.
She thinks of those young girls and realizes they must be quite a bit older now.
She imagines them going to good schools and getting important jobs.
She can’t imagine Rhonda would have it any other way.
She imagines Rhonda saying one went to Duke and the other Dartmouth, or maybe they both went to the same place because twins seem to get attached that way.
Her family on her dad’s side used to call her and Chip Irish twins because they were barely a year apart, and she never understood what that meant.
Her dad, whose family came from Kilkenny, hated that expression.
She imagines one of the girls a dentist now, the other working at a law firm in Philadelphia or New York. They are pretty, and Maggie wonders, if she had been able to move on and thrive, like a plant put in the right pot, what she would be doing now.
And then it comes to her with absolute certainty that she’d like to be just like Cat Ayers.
Mrs. Ayers was a young art teacher at the middle school. Before Chip got sick, when Maggie was a junior, she saw on the student bulletin board that they were looking for volunteers for an after-school painting workshop for sixth graders and signed up.
She remembers being sixteen and seeing Cat Ayers come down the hallway, wearing a white men’s shirt that looked crisp and clean with no paint spilled on it, tucked into a denim skirt.
She had long hair, clipped back but with a few strands in her face, big earrings, and a beaded necklace.
On her feet were a pair of velvet ballet flats.
She smelled like jasmine and emitted an energy that Maggie couldn’t turn away from.
She opened the door to her classroom, and it looked like a gallery.
Pottery on shelves, papier-maché puppets on a big table by the window.
There were birds’ nests and beehives collected inside a giant cabinet.
A mural on one wall looked like Monet had painted it, but Mrs. Ayers had done it herself.
She was so young, in her early twenties and fresh out of college, but she looked like she always knew what she was doing.
She asked Maggie to put paintings on the drying rack, to help the kids wash their hands with Lava soap at the big industrial sink.
She let the kids bring their little brothers and sisters if they wanted to come.
She trusted Maggie to show them how to create an ocean out of just dots and swirls, or how to draw noses, ears, and mouths on faces.
“You’re so good at this,” she exclaimed.
“Are you sure they didn’t send you from the Sorbonne? ”
“Just the high school,” Maggie said and smiled.
When the parents would come for pickup, the fathers stared at Mrs. Ayers like she’d cast a spell on them. The mothers too.
Everyone smiled around her. She was the person Maggie wished she could be when she grew up.
Cat Ayers, in a period of ten minutes, would be up on a stepladder hanging landscape sketches from a clothesline, and then she’d be ripping down a bulletin board display and putting up a new one about Harlem Renaissance artists.
She could draw Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait on the chalkboard without looking at a photograph, and she’d fire up the kiln as she trotted by.
Sometimes she had jazz music playing in the background, and one record started out with a harmonica, which made Maggie think of Chip, who at the time was an A student and baseball star and the apple of her parents’ eyes.
He loved his harmonica. He had gotten it one Christmas, and he’d just taught himself how to play “This Old Man,” “Camptown Races,” and “Alouette” when he was a beginner, and then eventually he could hear any song and match the notes.
One day, Maggie brought Cat Ayers some illustrations she’d sketched in pencil, and Cat looked at them like she was in a museum and they were on the wall in front of her.
“Good gracious, you’re a talent,” she said, shaking her head.
“They’re like Matisse and Cassatt had a baby.
” She spread them all out on one of the worktables, and the afternoon sun hit them in the perfect light.
“Just look at what you’ve done, Maggie.”
“Thanks.”
“What do you think you’ll do with these—are they part of something larger?”
Maggie shrugged. “I feel like if I just keep putting the pieces together maybe they’ll add up to something.”
Cat nodded. “I feel like they’re telling a story. The soft light, the birds. The people waiting for something.”
“Maybe,” Maggie said. And then the classroom door opened, and a tall man with nice hair and broad shoulders, wearing a hunter-green coat and a scarf around his neck, walked in.
“Hope I’m not too early,” he said in a deep voice.
Cat walked over to kiss him on the cheek. “Never, my dear.”
Maggie gathered her things and headed out to the parking lot with them, and when she got on her bike with the banana seat, she looked back and saw Mrs. Ayers and her husband holding hands as they walked to their car.
Alfred from Human Resources pops his head into Rhonda’s office. He has slicked-back hair and is older and has a slight New York accent. “Change of plans.” He cups his hand to his mouth in a mock whisper. “You’ll learn this happens here quite a lot.”
“Okay.” Maggie looks over at Taffy, who is sound asleep.
“You’re assigned to the horses.” He holds up his hand.
“Just joking. There’s a breakfast meeting with some administrators and board members this morning,” he says, “and Mrs. Simmons said you should attend as a kind of welcome aboard meal. But don’t spread the word.
Staff isn’t usually invited to this sort of thing.
” He shrugs. “She sure seems to like you.”
“Oh,” Maggie says, and looks down at her clothes. She wishes she’d worn something other than jeans. “I should run back and change.”
“You look just fine,” he says. “This isn’t the Plaza.”
“It feels like it.”
“Well, we’re pretty down-to-earth here.” He looks at her and chuckles. “Most of us.”
A woman comes in and smiles politely, handing him a stack of papers and a small white envelope. “Oh, almost forgot.” He tears the little envelope open and hands the contents to her. “Hot off the press.”
He places it in her hands, and she feels the small rectangle with a clipped pin in the back. A nametag with MAGGIE on it, the Red Maple hovering above her name.